Companies nearing mission critical apps in the cloud

A HP survey claims the majority of EMEA business will move mission critical apps to the cloud within the next five years.

Whilst cloud computing is utilised for smaller operations within a business, the bravery has been lacking when it comes to moving mission critical applications to the cloud.

However, this is set to change across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region in the near future, according to survey findings by HP.

Of the 940 respondents, 80 per cent said they would move mission critical apps into the cloud within the next two to five years, showing a slow but sure change in trust of the model.

However, the majority still cited security as their number one concern in cloud computing and didn’t feel the likes of hybrid cloud – offering a mix of on-premise and cloud solutions – had been fully explained to them.

HP would not be deterred though, and Mateen Greenway, HP fellow and chief technologist for public sector in EMEA, was positive of the direction cloud computing was taking.

Talking to what he called a “strange and motley crew” at a HP CTO event in London last night – attended by Cloud Pro – Greenway said: “In the early part of the cloud, you got that thing you get with all IT, thinking it will be a ‘silver bullet’ to solve all our problems.”

“Now, cloud is getting towards being an invisible technology; it is becoming the means to the end, not the end itself.”

Greenway continued to tout HP’s message of a ‘hybrid delivery model’ as the future of IT, but was frank explaining the reasons why.

“It is easy to build new cloud systems, but existing legacy estates are not designed for cloud; how do you fix that?” he said.

“We think a lot of the future will be hybrid as [companies] cannot afford to get rid of those legacy systems and need to incorporate what they have into any new model.”

Greenway, along with the rest of his firm, hopes to answer the issues its customers are having in “seeking guidance from third parties” to explore this model of cloud computing and, as a result, survey results in the next few years may look very different.

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